Leading Thoughts

Sustaining Worker Safety

Part 2: Elevating Engagement of Older & Younger Workers

By Robert Pater

Part 1 of this article left off discussing how to plan for a transitioning workforce, which delved into the upsides, downsides and differences between older and younger workers. This month, we'll discuss strategies that simultaneously elevate the engagement, safety and performance of both age groups.

Finding Similarities

The challenge for high-level safety leaders is to craft a unified strategy that simultaneously:

• motivates all workers, rather than leaving out significant segments (or broadcasting mixed messages);
• transfers mutually needed skill sets;
• melds together younger and older workers to work with, rather than against, one another.

Start by identifying the areas in which these workers' interests intersect. Experience has shown that both older and younger workers are 1) motivated by life beyond work; 2) seek more control in their lives; and 3) have five similar vulnerabilities.

Motivated by Life Beyond Work

Younger employees tend toward living, not just living to work. Similarly older workers often recognize life transitions on the horizon, investing increasingly more of themselves in personal interests, hobbies, family and/or community.

Incorporating off-work hobbies and activities in safety interventions is critical to both groups of workers. Therefore, leaders must include at-home safety as part of every intervention. This invites employees to develop and share personal methods for improving their performance and safety in favorite at-home activities. Leaders should consider implementing a home safety leader program and create materials for making decisions (ergonomic and safety) in personal purchasing.

Help everyone build a strong home safety culture by offering them inspiration and tools to become self-motivated and self-regulating. Promote mental strategies and physical skills they can readily port to a wide range of off-work activities. Enlist workers to help their peers with specific home-based applications. For example, the same safe methods for pushing a heavy cart at work also apply to pushing a full shopping cart or a loaded lawn cart.

Seek More Control in Their Lives

Younger workers often feel that their careers are somewhat bounded by or controlled by others, while older workers may deal with fears of losing capabilities and control.

I ultimately define stress as the feeling of being out of control. Everyone wants to have greater control over his/her own life. Make safety the good guy by transferring a range of practical methods to attain greater self-control under pressure and for less negative stress.

Five Similar Vulnerabilities

Younger and older workers can work on these vulnerabilities to improve their lives at work and off work, relatively quickly. (Some of the strategies even benefit more than one area of concern.)

Balance

Balance is the ability to stay on one's feet, especially while on the move, and apply full body strength to a task, not draining away excess physical power in overly fighting gravity.

Balance is critical for high performance in all activities (e.g., sports, hobbies). Improving balance can significantly help reduce soft-tissue injuries and hand incidents, as well as slips, trips and falls.

For younger workers, balance skills can help tune their abilities in favorite competitive activities, and help them feel more in control of themselves and their bodies.

Studies show that as people age, balance can become compromised for various reasons (e.g., inner ear, nerve cell and other changes).

Leaders can provide several options to help workers of both groups improve balance. All these skills can be readily and steadily learned at any age.

• Augment economy-of-motion training.
• Encourage inner-cue awareness.
• Help them improve leg strength and learn how to transfer force down through the legs.
• Transfer skills to tune up whole-body alignment.
• Help reduce rigidity-promoting tension.

Agility

The two main components of agility are range of motion and reaction time. Reduced agility can stem from overtension, being distracted/mentally unready or previous injury, as well as from several factors in the normal aging process.

But agility also can be greatly improved with the right approach and practice. Leaders can help all workers emphasize eye-hand coordination methods, forward-thinking and mental-rehearsal activities (akin to fire drills) to preprogram safe reactions to streamline reaction time.

In addition, leaders can:

• Consider changes in one's diet under physician's guidance to include supplements that help improve range of motion.
• Incorporate breathing techniques for enhancing flexibility and practical dynamic relaxation methods that can extend range of motion.
• Include movement techniques for improving flexibility.
• Promote stress-control to speed reaction time (think of a tensed cat that must relax down before running or fighting).
• Utilize efficient movement pathways for quickest and safest actions and reactions.

Energy

Energy refers to having sufficient mental and physical resources to direct attention, recall safest procedures, accomplish tasks in the safest manner (without having to resort to energy-saving shortcuts or being fatigued to the point of not lifting feet sufficiently or enlisting safety methods to move), and fully communicate about changing exposures and other safety issues. Lowered energy levels can adversely affect many types of injuries.

Again, worldwide experience indicates that everyone wants to be able to access more energy for what is important to them. Yet many people's reserves are drained by cumulative tension, sleep issues (prevalent in both younger and older workers), uncontrolled stress that shunts energy toward individual worries and fears, or blocked or shallow breathing.

The following can help people tap into and regenerate higher levels of energy:

• Posture Power, nine elements of postural alignment for greatest natural effect;
• Breath Power, coordinating breathing patterns with movement;
• sleep efficiency for replenishing reserves (more than just the number of hours);
• understanding and practically applying the three Laws of Motion for manual material handling;
• pacing for efficiency;
• great stress power control.

Focus

Focus refers to the abilities to direct attention, vision and memory to accomplish desired tasks as effectively as possible. On the prevention side, the inability to control focus can be a contributing factor in all incidents, but especially slips, trips and falls, struck by/struck against injuries, hand injuries, motor vehicle crashes, strains and sprains, and repeat incidents all of which affect younger and older workers.

As mentioned in Part 1, younger workers are better at switching than sustaining attention; while the reverse is true for older workers. Other factors affecting focus may include changes in vision/nearsightedness, sleep problems, fatigue, diet, poorly managed stress that results in tunnel vision and ineffective focal practices.

It is often believed that once lost to age or injury, brain function is unrecoverable. However, recent research into brain plasticity by Michael Merzenich and others has proven that the brain continues throughout life to create new neurons in response to mental activity. Therefore, what one does affects what one sees and then what one can accomplish.

Mature martial artists know that where they focus can make a significant difference in effectiveness. For example, when defending against a knife attack, most people's attention is drawn to the edge or point of the blade. This, however, moves quickly and can be difficult to visually detect. Adepts instead focus on the attacker's forearm. Where this moves, so does the blade, only slower. Focusing on this makes it significantly easier to disarm an opponent. This same principle of focus control applies to innumerable applications.

To enhance focus control:

• Introduce brain exercises that strengthen switching or sustaining, as needed.
• Use task variation to prevent mental complacency (think of it as mental job rotation or enlargement).
• Raise lighting levels in areas of greatest exposure (e.g., top of staircases).
• Select dietary supplements, with qualified medical supervision, such as DHA, certain antioxidants and foods associated with improvements in memory (e.g., berries).
• Use attention-control skills for ergonomically matching desired attention pattern (wide vs. narrow/inner focused vs. outer focused) to changing tasks.
• Encourage skills that emphasize inner cue awareness to monitor propriocentric feedback (e.g., Over what part of my foot is my weight right now? How can I make slight shifts to move myself toward better balance and strength?).

Strength

Most people, young or old, relish the prospect of becoming physically stronger. This is well within the reach of almost all without necessarily lifting weights. According to WebMD, sarcopenia, age-related muscle loss, can result in the loss of 3% to 5% of muscle mass for each decade a person lives after the age of 30.

Enhancing usable strength can improve performance in at-work and at-home activities; elevate self-esteem; and help prevent a wide array of injuries, especially strains and sprains, and slips, trips and falls.

Proven methods to elevate usable strength (not necessarily muscle size) include:

• learning and applying methods for positioning and distance control that boost personal leverage;
• off-loading to make better use of the nondominant hand to accomplish tasks;
• certain supplements, under physician's care;
• weight shifting to enhance ability to lift, carry, push and pull;
• bracing principles; learning to enlist stronger muscle groups;
• unified movement that employs full, rather than partial, body strength for safer manual material handling.

Beyond Sustaining

Expert leadership doesn't settle for just sustaining or conserving current resources; the mind-set is that it is better to augment them. Strongest leaders aim to mend cultural divides between younger and older workers by focusing on what is important to them all.

They stem the tide of foreseeable losses to function by actively bolstering present strengths. They efficiently go beyond either-or thinking by simultaneously honing safety/health, morale/engagement and productivity/quality among current and prospective workers on all levels.

Robert Pater, M.A., is managing director of SSA/MoveSMART (www.movesmart.com). Clients include Alcoa, Amtrak, Avon, DuPont, Harley-Davidson, Honda, Johnson & Johnson, Marathon Oil, Mead Westvaco, Michelin/BF Goodrich, Pitney Bowes, Textron, United Airlines, US Steel, Xerox and many more. He has presented at numerous ASSE conferences and webinars. His book, Leading From Within, has been published in five languages.